IN THE SILENCE

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Autumn was our favourite time/Picking fruit and kicking leaves/By the long walks in the afternoons/And our games between the trees/Now the branches stiff and bare/And the hills so cold and plain/losing you was losing everything/But it must be heaven’s gain

It’s a massive hole as big as Rubislaw quarry where the granite was gouged out to build the silver city. You can peer over the edge but you can’t see the bottom. It’s as deep as the Mariana trench and I don’t know how it could ever be filled. Words and music and poetry don’t cut it and only serve to accentuate and magnify the loss. Art and architecture and doing things are simply distractions. Even the extravagant love of friends and family and neighbours won’t do it either. Another love? The idea is both preposterous and, in this moment, obscene. My imagine can’t stretch that far. Someone has said “Why don’t you get a dog?” In the biblical picture two have become one flesh. How then do you cope when half your flesh has been ripped out? A fellow travel has said perceptively “ I knew who we were, but I don’t know what I am”. Others have said “ Yes, it is a massive hole but you learn to live with it” I don’t want to learn to live with it.

It is the silence that is unbearable. I can speak. I can say the words out loud but I know she won’t reply. I can tell her all about my day but she won’t respond. She is not here. I don’t want to be the one who goes up each week to that beautiful spot on the south slope with the hedge of trees in the horizon to lay new flowers on the ground and speak to her as if she was there. That’s what they do in the movies. Its not a game I can play.

Strange how the words people say to comfort are no comfort at all. Wonderful words of scripture. I know they are good, solid and true. I know they are God’s words, they are the words of life, I believe them with all my heart, I truly do, but, and this is the thing, I don’t feel it. I don’t feel it and I have to feel it to be comforted. These are somehow harder to bear than the lies written on cards. “Those we love don’t go away, they walk beside us everyday”, heartfelt, well-meaning, loving words, but I know they are lies. She doesn’t walk beside me every day, she has gone away.

Yet there is so much I want to tell her and keep telling her:  how thrilling it was to meet up with A and see how she had grown and matured into such a lovely confident young woman, how kind it was of G+J to think and to ask and to invite me round for diner, how nice it was that F said nothing just offered a hug when we met in the street, how thoughtful of C to take time out of her very busy life to come round and talk, how special that A was up for a long walk along the front and speak about deep things. how nervous I was to be with our group and yet how easy it was in that time, how I desperately didn’t want to be the sad old man in the corner, how easily I was hurt by some of the things folk said and did or didn’t do, how possessive I felt when they spoke about you as if they knew you better than I did myself, how people promised to pray and I know they did and more so much more: the lovely walk with S through the carpet of leaves that jewel the ground along the burn with the translucent red and yellow ones still hanging in space or the way the sun rose over Fife and  cast its shimmering light across the river while the morning car lights twingled as they sped over the bridge.  How blessed I am, and how lost.

In the silence, I call out “Where are you?” But there is no reply.

And then barely audible at first but soon as clear as day I hear a voice, a still small voice. “I am here, I have been here all along, long before you ever knew me.  I loved you from the beginning and I know all about your pain and your loss but come to me, speak to me, take this new found time and space I have given you to share with me to listen to my voice and learn of me, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light and there you will find rest for your soul”

And I find John Newton’s letter he wrote to Mrs Talbot on the death of her husband in March 1774:

“…Though every stream must fail, the fountain is still full and still flowing. All the comfort you ever received in your dear friend was from the Lord, who is abundantly able to comfort you still…The lord who knows our frame does not expect or require that we should aim at a stoical indifference under his visitations. He allows that afflictions are at present not joyous, but grievous; yea, He was pleased when upon earth to weep with his mourning friends when Lazarus died. But he has graciously provided for the prevention of that anguish and bitterness of sorrow, which is upon such occasions, the portion of such as live without God in the world; and has engaged that all shall work together for good, and the yield the peaceable fruits of righteousness. May he bless you with a sweet serenity of spirit, and a cheerful hope of the glory that shall shortly be revealed.”   

PRECIOUS AND BEAUTIFUL THINGS

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THE PAINFUL REALITY

It was not how I had it planned. It was not the way it was meant to be. I was to be first. When the evil mass took hold of my liver three years before and left me surrounded with doctors and nurses in full-on emergency gear, trying  to keep me alive, I was convinced that this was it. But it was not to be. With their skill, the prayers of the people and the good and gracious hand of our God, I survived. But later, later that same year, the cancer made its presence known in her body. From then it continued its sinister and relentless pincer movement throughout her delicate frame, spreading its tentacles to the most important organs, till there was nothing left that could be done.  The painful reality had to be faced, it was just a matter of time. Despite the treatment, the chemo, the radio, and immunotherapy, this thing inside her was slowly killing her and it would not let go.

HEARING BUT NOT LISTENING
I had three years to prepare for this event, but I wasn’t prepared. Even when the consultant told us it was weeks rather than months, I wanted to scream out in disbelief. Yet she knew and she tried so hard to tell me, to prepare me, to help me see, but I wasn’t listening and I didn’t see. It seemed like the cancer had been kept at bay. Life was as normal, nothing had changed and we could go on like this for years, maybe even decades. Yet she knew, she was right all along and I was wrong.

Nobody had told me about it how it would be or how I would feel. No one had explained to me what bereft actually meant. But, the thing is, they had, in words, in books, in poetry, in songs. It was all there it was just that I hadn’t listened. I couldn’t hear. I even wrote these songs myself. Ten years ago I wrote a song about bereavement through the seasons, but I never knew what it meant until now. I remember reading Bob Dylan’s comments on songs on one of his early album, which were preoccupied with death. He said he was too young to write songs like that, so they must have come from somewhere else.

THE EVENINGS
In the evenings, when we are alone and nothing else was happening, we would read the bible, with a devotional book someone had given her and we would pray together. It was a practice that was fitful at best throughout our married life but became a regular habit in the later years. It made me so happy. Each time I heard her pray, I cried. It was in the evening too, that we talked. We talked about the things we did that day and played the game “ Guess who I saw in town today?”  A song by John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful came to mind. It was written back in the sixties and called “Darlin be home soon”. The recording seemed a bit cheesy, even at the time, but the song got to me then and strangely it came back to me now, with the opening lines “Come, and talk of all the things we did today/Hear, and laugh about our funny little ways..”   It occurred to me too that this was what happened in the garden. It was in the evening of the day that God came and walked and talked with Adam and Eve. It is in the evenings that I feel most bereft.

HOW SHORT HOW SHORT

It all happened so quickly in the end. Sunday, we were sitting out having lunch in the garden. Monday brought an emergency GP appointment and a swift referral to the oncology ward. She was visibly relieved to lie down on that bed and be surrounded with the care she needed.  By the Wednesday evening, I was so exhausted and distracted, she pleaded with me to go home and rest. On the Thursday morning, I was taking notes with her instructions of things to do that day, while she was messaging people with arrangements for a meeting in the following week. It was a busy day, people were coming and going and I had now grasped that time was short. I resolved to be awake when I returned in the evening and to make sure that I packed my bible and the book. When we were alone in the stillness , when the buzz of the ward had quietened down, we could read and pray together, just as we had done before. But it was not to be. By lunchtime she was gone.

THE EMPTY HOUSE
When I opened the door of the empty house for the first time, I was hit with the banal absurdity of it all. What was this place now for? What was the point of it? It was our home, now it wasn’t. It was my “stop all the clocks” moment. There was no need for this anymore. The newly decorated room, the restored windows, the Morris paper, the walnut floor, the Louie Poulsen lighting, the hand-crafted kitchen the carefully selected colours and fabrics, they were all about a place, our home, where friends and family from far and near would be welcomed, to share a meal, a rest for the night or longer. We wanted to be like the Shunamite woman who had a room with a bed, a chair, a table and a lamp for the prophet Elisha when he passed that way. Now it’s purpose has dissolved and I don’t know what to do.

THE OBSERVATION

Too soon, much too soon I read again C S Lewis’ “A Grief Observed”. It was brutal: grief was being like a “rat caught in a trap”, the bereaved were such a problem, maybe “they should be isolated in special colonies like lepers”, God must be a “giant vivisectionist” and worse. But he works his way through all of that in the most astonishing way. He climbs through the self-indulgent grief the self-pity, the flawed images and the house of cards to finally seeing “ I need Christ not something that resembles him” I hope I can get there.

THE PRECIOUS AND BEAUTIFUL THINGS
I love the proverb in the Book of Proverbs 24:3+4 partly because of its architectural reference. It goes: “By wisdom a house is built/By understanding it is established/By knowledge the rooms are filled with precious and beautiful things”. Together we built the house, she filled it with precious and beautiful things and the precious and beautiful things were people. My task is to cherish these precious and beautiful things.

FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE LANGUAGE

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If you want to make something distasteful into something more palatable, changing the name helps a lot. It might not be etymologically correct, but if you get it accepted in everyday discourse your battle is pretty much won. You can change people’s view of something by changing the name. That has long been the case. We used to build large tower blocks and call them “courts” which they never were, but it sounded better to live in a court than a tower.  Killing civilians in wartime didn’t seem so bad if we called it “collateral damage”. Same sex marriage could get over the line if we called it “Equal marriage”. If you are pro-abortion a “foetus” sounds better than an expected baby. You know how it works. Flipping it the other way, also works.

Nothing epitomises that more than the media and governments inversion of language when it comes to the current war in the Middle East. Here you have a whole slew of descriptive words that have not only drifted from their original meaning but been upended and become part of almost everyone’s conversation. Our language has been so massaged that we end up adopting terms that bear no actual relation to reality. The power of the media with its subtle infiltering of a mindset pulls us into the absurd situation, where we find ourselves believing something which is manifestly untrue and the simplest of investigation would show it to be so.

Images play a big role here.  The manipulation is clearly effective.  People will protest  “We have all seen the pictures daily on our screens” without a second questioning if what we see on these screens might not actually be true.  We have this strange ambivalence to the visual image, be it still or moving. We have no trouble seeing videos of Putin and Trump romping around on sledges in the snow and hugging polar bears in Alaska, knowing that they are fabricated. At the same time, we are convinced that a picture of an emaciated child in the rubble of a building, tells a true story. A story of deliberate mass starvation, even when the picture in question, featured on the front page of the New York Times is completely false, as the paper later acknowledged.  It was too late, of course. The picture was false but the narrative was believed.  

You know the words: ethnic cleansing, starvation, indiscriminate, massacre, apartheid, and genocide. These are universally used across the board and accepted as fact without question. When I hear the media use these words in the context of Israel’s war against Hamas, I realise they are speaking a different language from the one I know. In their classic usage they bear no resemblance to reality and are an inversion of it. It makes it hard and pretty much impossible to discuss or engage with the issue in any rational way.  When the common language is lost, we are left with shouting, name calling, flag waving, flag burning and the babel of hatred, with Jackboots waiting in the wings.

First, they came for the language, but it was only words, so I said nothing.

LOVE AND LEARNING

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We met in a café at the west end of Union Street in Aberdeen in the late sixties. It was place often frequented by students for coffee in late evening, called The Pharaohs, decorated in Egyptian style with hieroglyphics. There were four us ending up together after a student meeting in the commercial college nearby. Two guys from the school of architecture and the girls from the college of education. My friend was a year my senior super confident and sophisticated, a great talker and natty dresser. I was in his train, just listening most of the time. One of the girls had caught my eye and I was intrigued by her taste, unusual at the time, for black coffee. My friend was not so impressed. As we left and made our way up Albyn Place, I asked who were they? What were their names? We hadn’t even asked! I don’t recall what he said, but he didn’t know and he wasn’t really bothered. It didn’t really matter to him, but it did to me and over the coming months, I not only found out her name but learned a lot about her, took every opportunity to spend time with her and as we walked past the rendezvous café on Cromwell Road one late Sunday afternoon, I found her hand.

A year and a bit later. I proposed. We had been out walking on a glorious spring day from Kilchoan to Kilkieran on the west coast of Islay. The sun was shimmering across the sea, seagulls gathering and gannets diving over a suspected shoal in the waters, lambs were bleating and a dog barking in the distance. We stopped on a little stone bridge over a burn and I asked her if she would marry me. I don’t remember her exact words but I took it as “yes” and for the next 50 plus years she was a constant in my life. I could fill the page with many justifiable superlatives and words of gratitude and admiration but that would simply be a parody of the reality of a relationship that simply could not be put into words. 

One of the unusual aspects of our bond was the she did not share any of my creative interests and passions.  Art, music, poetry and literature didn’t seem to touch or move her. That would be considered, by many, to be a severe handicap. Strangely it was our strength and perhaps was the singular thing that saved me from drowning in a pit of my own self-indulgence and self-importance. It sharpened my pencil and honed a self-critical tone to what I tried to do.  Her creativity was not with the ephemeral arts but with people and it was that interest in and interaction with other people from all sorts of backgrounds and cultures and languages and traditions which was the singular factor in drawing me out of what could have been a very insular and self-absorbed life.

We were married in the Baptist Church in Perth in 1971, by our minster William Still of Gilcomston South Church Aberdeen and he took us through our vows with his inimitable sonorous voice. The building was destroyed by fire some years later and most of the 80 guests who joined us, on that day, have since departed, but the details of that event are permanently imprinted on my mind. It was the experience of finally moving into a home of our own, however, that really got to me. We tried to rent a flat which was difficult at that time, till our solicitor suggested we might buy. It seemed completely out of the question to us, but with help from my father-in-law and a loan from a finance company we managed to gather the £850 to purchase a ground floor two roomed flat across the river Dee in Torry, just two weeks before our wedding day.  It had a toilet in the close and a single cold water tap and sink in the kitchen. We purchased a bed, a cooker, painted the floor boards kingfisher blue, laid down rugs and with generous wedding gifts, put together the semblance of a home. We were so happy. On the first Saturday back, I remember very clearly watching my young wife walk across the street and down the lane, with her crocheted top and short skirt and shopping bag going off into town. I was overcome with the indescribable feeling of warmth that she would be back soon and it would be to our home.   There was something about the drama of courtship, having spent each night apart, each evening having to say goodbye, each time going back to our separate accommodation and then, finally, to experience the completed joy of being together.

We did our best and felt it our duty to share that joy whenever we could. An older and wiser couple in the church explained to us how they believed that their home was not really theirs but a gift from God to be used for others, a haven in an otherwise hostile world.  We tried our best to emulate that principle. In the early 2000s this took on a new dimension when we were asked to host international students who came to our city’s universities. A friend in our church asked us if we wanted to be part of the hospitality scheme. The idea was that students, strangers to a foreign country could be linked up with local families.  It was a simple act and one of the main thrusts in the establishment of Friends International. Our first attempts to make contact were fraught with difficulties. This was, of course, in the age before emails, mobile phones and social media. We failed miserably at first and seemed unable to make any serious connection and wondered if we were cut out for this sort of thing.  We were on the point of giving up and telling our friend that it wasn’t going to work, when we were linked, first, with students from Greece and Turkey and the following year with two master students from Kosovo. They had come to study with a professor of forensic medicine after being directly involved in the identification of bodies following the Balcon genocides.

And so began an enormously privileged experience, over more than two decades with international students, some of whom have become life-long friends, some who invited us to their weddings, some whom we have visited in their own countries and many who we still communicate with regularly. They came from almost all parts of the world from: Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Egypt,  and Algeria in the African continent, from Asia: China, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, Uzbekistan, Iran, Australia, India and Pakistan, from the Americas: Canada, the USA, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, and Haiti and from Europe: France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, the Czech Republic , Slovakia, Austria, Spain, Romania, Hungary and the Netherlands.    This usually began with the offer of a simple meal in our home. It was such an easy thing to do and yet seemed to be so appreciated by the strangers we welcomed in. When our son and his wife left to work in Hungary and latterly Romania, we began to understand why this was so. Somehow the unnerving strangeness of life in an alien city, with the sounds, the colours the smells the cultural peculiarities and sometimes the threatening air, were instantly tamed when you were received into someone’s home and into the bosom of a family.

With the expansion of the work of Friends International we were asked to host a small group bible study in our own home. This was a simple meal together followed by a discussion bible study around a passage in the bible. The idea was that this would provide an opportunity for those who wanted to know more about Christianity, “seekers” as they were called. Quite quickly, however it was Christians who wanted to join us and a place where they could invite their friends from the library and lab. All we would do would pray and read the bible together and talk about what it said, what it meant and what it meant to us. While the majority of those who came were Christians, followers of Jesus from various backgrounds, Protestants, Catholics Orthodox and Pentecostals there were always one or two and maybe more of other faiths, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Atheists. There was something wonderful about sitting round in that small group with the freedom to talk, discuss faith and share deep things. For me, It was the highlight of the week. I was energised and excited about what was happening; about what God was doing. Often, we would have people from four continents share in prayer. On one occasion we listened to  the Lord’s prayer in seven different languages. At other times we had students whose countries were literally at war with each other, sit side by side. To be involved in all of this had to be one of the great privileges of my life. And all of it would not have happened had I not met up with that young student in the café in Aberdeen with her shy dark smile and her black coffee.

But there was much more that would not have happened without her. Together we encountered the miracle of new life. At once it was an intimate and deeply personal experience yet filled with cosmic significance. The moment there holding that fragile little life, wholly dependent, its tiny face creased in a smile, eyes just opening and perfect fingers with finger nails already needing cutting. Knowing that we were strangely connected yet separate and the overpowering desire to protect the little creature that eclipsed all the other responsibilities. In that moment the world changed. I have observed, over the years many parents, fathers in particular, often when we shared a common interest in art, music, politics, theology and world affairs, suddenly discover that their enthusiasm and interest seemed to be blanked out over the period where they had very young children. Perhaps it is a natural coping mechanism. The world can go it’s own way, all I care about in this moment is my little family. And when I look back, I can see quite clearly the gaps in my own interest or even awareness of big things happening. These were curiously erased from my experience during these periods which were dominated by the interruption of a new life, one that demanded our full concentration.  It takes photographs to rekindle the memories, not so much about the events, but how we felt in those days and leafing through an old biscuit tin of photographs can leave you lost in a whirlwind of deep emotion and tears.

The babies grew into toddlers and children and adults finally disappeared out the door to find their own lives. In a short space of time, we had six grandchildren and it is a constant wonder how this all came about and how it some way we had a part in it. Recognising the familial characteristic and traits is at times comforting at other times scary but always humbling. The spread of gifts is astonishing, two are already talented musicians, one a writer, one an already decorated sportsman and another an unconscious actor and comedian. And the sixth? We have yet to see.

This all came rolling back to me when I met up with a good friend recently. I like him a lot, but he sometimes tires me out when he goes into a one of his nonsensical irrational tirades. I just listen and let him ramble on until he runs out of steam and then If there is anything to say by way of response, I will say it. It was like that this day. He was in rambling rant about his love life or lack of it, speaking just a bit too loud for my liking in the crowded café. It was not only irrational it was a mess of misogynistic misery. The girls were teases, devious, playing along and only after your money. At times it was quite comical like Bob Dylan’s dream:

“I got a woman, she’s so mean/Puts my boots in the washing machine/Fills me with buckshot when I’m nude/She puts chewing gum in my food/She is funny/Calls me honey/wants my money”

Finally he said calming down “Anyway, you can’t commit to loving someone all your life. No one can do it. It’s an impossible dream.”

I had to respond. “ Well, I don’t know, but I met her when I was still a teenager, we have been married for 50 plus years. I love her more now than I ever did and I don’t want to lose her.”

Marriage is about loving and learning to love in sickness and health, in riches and poverty, till death.

Crawford Mackenzie

A CLUTTER OF CONUNDRUMS

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1 The Death Cult

On an evening last week, I watched the late evening news broadcast on the BBC. You will probably wonder why I do or why I still pay the licence fee, when the corporation is, in my view, unashamedly institutionally biased. But it’s complicated. I am not the only one in our household and I also want to hear how the BBC report the news. I want to know what they say, how they say it and what they don’t say. On that evening there was a report by their medical editor, Fergus Walsh on his trip to California to see how Assisted Dying was doing there. They interviewed a man who had chosen to die and he explained the reasons why. He didn’t have long to live, he hated hospitals and didn’t want to be hooked up to tubes and machines etc. He apparently suffered from a multitude of serious, chronic and painful conditions, although in the interview he looked remarkably good. There are times when I have looked a lot worse. It was all the usual less-than-subtle propaganda we are well used to from the corporation. But what followed still shocked me to the core. The crew came back to film a second interview but this time it was to allow us to witness his death in real time. The horror was compounded by how reasonable and even compassionate it was portrayed. It was simple and easy a mixture of white powder in a jar (guaranteed to be fatal) with some fruit juice. He swallowed it closed his eyes and that was that. 30 minutes the doctor said. The family hugged and the crew left with a sweet shot of a bamboo branch waving in the wind against a cloudless Californian sky, but I felt sick to the bottom of my stomach. 

Tell me please, if you can, because I can’t make sense of it.

We are exercised about harmful material on- line, we have an on-line safety bill and an on-line regular in place ready to take action against a pro-suicide forum which is believed to promote and facilitate suicides, has tens of thousands of members and is linked to more than 50 deaths including children. (I got that from the BBC) . At the same time the main evening news shows the video of an actual suicide, someone taking their own life and explains how it was done.

There is something here that I just can’t make sense of. How can you hold these two things together without doing violence to any sense you might have of reason or integrity?

If you can explain it, I would love to know.

SUING FOR WAR

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The sight of a parliament, normally embroiled in savage personal attacks, speaking as one and showing a remarkable unity of purpose, ought to be one that should cheer our hearts and restore our faith in politicians.  Strangely it has the opposite effect. When sworn enemies suddenly become friends and join in a common cause it is often more worrying and seldom for the good. I cannot ignore the deep suspicion of this temporary marriage of convenience and I wonder who is the common foe. It reminds me of the second Psalm where the Kings of the earth gather together in their futile and laughable attempt to plot against God.  In Westminster there was the unity at the start of the first and second wars in Iraq and there was the unity over Covid. History has shown where these have led.

So I took no comfort from the concocted harmony on display in the palace of Westminster this week, when the Prime Minister gave his report on the momentous events of the past days. I didn’t feel proud to be British then. What was on open display was a commitment to support with cash and lives (boots on the ground is a nice way of talking about real people who will be wearing these boots) the continuation of a war that has been going on for three years and shows no sign of stopping. I wanted to hear from the Peace Movement from Stop the War Coalition from the Anti-Nuclear campaigners, but in Westminster there was silence. And here is one of the biggest conundrums: our money, our taxes are paying for the terrible weapons that maim and kill thousands every week on our doorstep and we seem to be ok with that. This is not theoretical. This is not about weapons of mass destruction that have killed no-one for the past 80 years, this is about weapons manufactured in our land, today, that are being sent to blow up young men and women in a land not that far away from us and our politicians seem to be all for it.

It is hard to get your head round that one.

They are united in their condemnation of the one person, the one world leader who is screaming for peace. He is desperate to bring the terrible carnage to an end. He is using the massive power and influence of his office and his own skill in making deals for that purpose and our pathetic little parliament doesn’t like it. They want this war to go on, when it as plain as day that it cannot be won, unless, of course, it finally triggers the third world war when these weapons held in their silos for 80 years will finally be unleashed.

So now as I’m leavin’
I’m weary as Hell
The confusion I’m feelin’
Ain’t no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And they fall to the floor
That if God’s on our side
He’ll stop the next war

IT’S NOT DARK YET BUT I’TS GETTING THERE

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I fully identified and completely understood King Charles, some weeks ago, when he was confronted with the pitiful pile of children’s shoes, on Holocaust Day, and said it was something he would never forget. I had visited the holocaust gallery at the British War Museum and the Yad Vashem remembrance centre in Jerusalem, but it was being in Auschwitz, Oświęcim in 2012 that did it for me. I saw the railway carriage, the mountain of shoes and false teeth, the bullet ridden wall, I stood in the chamber with the ovens when the young Polish guide asked us to be silent out of respect for those who were incinerated there and I stood at the end of the rail line, when she told us to be careful where we stood, because the ground was covered with the powdered bones and dust of the million souls murdered in this place. It was April, but there was no sign of Spring. The trees were dark and bare and there was no bird song to lighten the awful silence. The bottom dropped out of my stomach and I realised then, in a way I had never understood before, that there was no end to evil. Given a free reign, evil in the human heart descends further and further into an abyss of total darkness. It was like looking over a pit and knowing there was no bottom. Any faith I had in humanity could never be recovered. I too would never forget.

All these memorials are helpful but we really don’t need reminders. We saw it, just this week, on full display to all the world, the abomination of naked evil. The choreographed parade, the giant displays, the stage, the mock signing of documents, the celebrating crowd, the cameras and in the centre the bodies of the murdered family, the mother, the nine year old son and the four year old child lying on the platform locked in black coffins. All was black and grey even the sun couldn’t bear to look at the scene and hid it’s face. The sky was embarrassed. This too I will never forget.

The holocaust, however, was then. This is now. That was our “never again”. This is the now reality of evil. There can be no rational, political or sociological explanation for the utter depravity on view. And its roots are in the oldest of hatreds morphed, as Jonathan Sachs lucidly explained, from hatred against the religion through hatred against the race to hatred against the nation and it comes from the very pit of hell.

The main-line news has to sanitise their reports, of course. It has to fit the narrative and so every effort must be made to soften the impact and whiten what is, in reality, irredeemably black. They don’t show you the crowds of men, women and children, some in their father’s arms, shouting cheering and singing over the bodies of the murdered children and later dancing on the stage as if it was their graves. This is a new level of wickedness. The Nazis’ tried to hide their crimes, here they are openly celebrated. And this is what is truly sickening.  When, what looks like, ordinary folk with families of their own, taking part, joyfully it seems, in such a macabre spectacle, any sense of humanity goes down the drain. And I wonder if those who protest on our streets every Saturday actually know who they are supporting.

Terrible as it may sound, I have no faith in humanity. If I had, I lost it and nothing could restore it now. But I do have faith in the one who created humanity, who became humanity, who lived perfect humanity and by his sacrifice made it possible for us unhuman: murderers, liars, cheats, mockers idolators, adulterers, abusers, thieves, slanderers, swindlers, or just decent folks to be made truly human, in him.

THE LONG MARCH OF PROGRESSIVISM

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There was something depressingly inevitable about the progress towards the legalising of assisted suicide. The details of the bill now published only confirms this. The list of robust safeguards “the strictest in the whole world” will be enough to win over the doubters and get the bill through the process and into law. The message is clear. This is no slippery slope. We will not be following Canada or the Netherlands, where mental health and even homelessness are justified reasons for ending lives. We will not be coercing doctors to be involved and there will be stringent legal sanctions against any who flout these measures. We have the most rigorous safeguards in place.

We all know, of course, how safeguards have worked out in the past. They never seem to be as safe as they are purported to be. The slide down the slippery slope is almost certain. Safeguards are useful in getting the thing over the line, but once there, they have served their purpose and can be dispensed with at will. That too is inevitable. 

Once the law is in place, you can be sure, different groups who will be excluded under the safeguards, will lobby justifiably so, for the law to be changed to cover their own circumstances. It would be unfair to those who expect to live longer than the legal nine months and whose suffering is prolonged. It would be inequitable to exclude the mentally ill. It would be unreasonable to exclude parents of children who are seriously disabled who are themselves unable to express their own suffering. It is almost as if the more robust the safeguards are, the easier they will be to circumvented.

Is that cynical alarmism? I don’t think so. The abortion act of 1967 was brought in to deal with a small number of difficult cases with robust safeguards in place. Since then, over 10 million lives have been legally destroyed and we hardly give it a thought, almost fourteen thousand in one year (2021) in Scotland alone. These precious vulnerable little beautiful lives are not even worthy of silent prayer.

This is how it works out and this is where progressiveness leads: the liquidation of the unborn, the dismantling of marriage and the family, the denial of biology, the culling of the old and sick and, and finally, the destruction of humanity itself.  Life is just another human construct, after all.  Arguing against it now seems futile.

We had a senior palliative care doctor speak to our home group on the vexed issue, a few months ago. While she was deeply troubled by the proposed change in the law and wholly against it, she felt that as a clinician she could not use her religious beliefs in a debate. The argument had to be made on other grounds to be accepted as valid. Interestingly this was the same position that Danny Kruger took in what was an excellent debate with Christine Jardine on Channel 4 https://www.channel4.com/news/mps-go-head-to-head-in-assisted-dying-debate. If Christian medics feel that they can’t argue from a Christian view of life, for fear that it would not be taken seriously and politicians can’t argue from their own deeply held religious views, then the cause is already lost. Danny Kruger almost admitted that in the interview.

How then can you object, if your religious beliefs carry no weight in the secular world?  What can you do when the battle is already lost and won?

Well, I remember, very clearly, a conversation I had with our Slovakian house guest, several years ago. She was with us for a year and early on in her stay she was puzzled by a controversy that was blowing up in the church. It was to do with the appointment of ministers who were living in openly same-sex adulterous relationships. I tried to explain the situation as openly and fairly as I could, detailing both sides of the argument (the traditional and the progressive) and how each took their authority from scripture. She was quiet. So, I asked innocently “What do you think?” She turned and looked at me with an expression I will never forget. It was a mixture of shock, unbelief and barely concealed hostility. “It is wrong!” was her vehement reply.

I know that this attitude wouldn’t get far in the current debate.  But, and here is the point, some issues, I am convinced, should not be up for debate. We should not be discussing whether the state should sponsor the killing of those who are ill. It is wrong. Life is not a human construct. Life is a gift, a precious gift from God.  We did not choose it and we did not buy it. We did not decide to born, we did not decide where or when or to which parents and no human institution has the authority to sanction its ending. 

Assisting suicide is wrong. It may be inevitable but it is still wrong.

HISTORICAL GUILT

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The denomination to which our local church belongs recently found it necessary to carry out an audit and examine what links the church may have had with the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.  As a relatively newcomer in the denomination, I was unaware of the controversy, that dated back to the early days of the church, which was founded in 1843. What at first was puzzling was that Slavery had already been outlawed in the antis-slavery act ten years earlier (though this only covered part of the British Empire) and it seemed strange that the church could be complicit in slavery when it was still unborn.  The reason for the controversy, however, was explained, by a visit which a delegation from the new church made to the American South in 1846. This group which included Thomas Chalmers were seeking the support of churches in America and you can understand why a secessionist movement would get a great deal of sympathy in the South. The delegation returned with a not insignificant gift of £3,000, but many within and out-with the church considered this money to be “tainted” as it likely came from slaveholders and a campaign to “Send the Money Back” was initiated. Fredrick Douglas, the abolitionist, was a strong and vocal advocate for the campaign, and lent his support while in Scotland, which included an attempt, with others, to carve the slogan on the cliffs of Salisbury Crags. His portrait now graces a wall in Gilmore Place, close to where he once lived. But the “blood money” was never returned. How the church resolved this at the time, I am not sure, but I suspect that a degree of pragmatism was involved. Even if an error was acknowledged, returning the money would not have helped the cause of those still enslaved in any practical way.

But why, more than 150 years after the event, the issue has now had to be revisited?  It seems strange in the extreme. Afterall, the history of these events has been well known to the church and this assessment could have been done at any time. Why now?  And why is that while the history of this hideous trade has been taught in school and accepted for what it is a heinous sin in our nation’s history, one on which there was national admission of guilt, repentance, the passing of anti-slavery laws and the costly efforts to have the trade banished world-wide, why now is there to be a another reckoning? 

Is it simply to do with the way these things come in waves in the public consciousness?  I remember in the 60’s the campaign for nuclear disarmament was a very hot issue, but strangely over the following decades, despite increased proliferation, the issue slipped into the background and only resurged again in the more recent decades. I remember one of my colleagues in our Architectural practice back in the early 70’s arriving at the office one day sporting a CND badge. We thought that rather quant at the time.

Could it be the very subtle infiltration of a way of thinking that owes more to Marx and Lenin than our Judeo-Christian heritage? A way of thinking that views the act of de-humanising another human, made in the image of God, not so much as a sin but simply part of the worldwide class struggle? The never-ending battle between the oppressed and the oppressor, the powerless and the powerful, the victim and the victimiser.  Guilt is not so much personal but historical and in Marxism there is no forgiveness. Czeslaw Milosz, in his classic work “The Captive Mind” which must stand alongside works by Orwell, Solzhenitsyn and Havel in exposing the depravity of totalitarian culture, explains this succinctly in a chapter entitled “Man- the enemy”. Here the real enemy of the Marxist-Leninist project turns out to be humanity itself.   

“The contradiction between Christianity and Stalinist philosophy cannot be overcome. Christianity is based on a concept of individual merit and guilt; The New Faith on historical merit and guilt. The Christian who rejects individual guilt denies the work of Jesus and the god he calls upon transforms himself into History”

The enemy then is the reactionary.

“The sin of the reactionary is argued very cleverly: every perception is orientated, i.e. at the very moment of perceiving, we introduce our ideas into the material of our observations; only he sees reality truly who evaluates it in terms of the interests of the class that is the lever of the future, i.e. the proletariat. The writings of Lenin and Stalin teach us what the interests of the proletariat are. Whoever sees reality other than the proletariat, sees it falsely; in other words, his picture of reality is deformed by the pressure of the interest of classes that are backward and so destined to disappear. Whoever sees the world falsely necessarily acts badly; whoever acts badly is a bad man; therefore, the reactionary is a bad man, and one should not feel sorry for him.”

So you can feel indifferent to the sufferings of those whose only crime is the blocking of “historical progress” and Milosz concludes :

“This line of reasoning has at least one flaw – it ignores reality”      

But I suspect there is also another reason. It is much easier and less troublesome to focus on vague historical communal guilt and show virtue over our passion for the sins, than it is to confront the brutal reality that slavery exists today. Added to that is the disturbing thought that we could in some way be complicit in and benefit from it.

My contention is that instead of wasting our efforts, handwringing and agonising over the crimes of the pasts, we should be grappling with the brutal reality of slavery today. Instead of exhuming skeletons, historic crimes, which have been acknowledged and confessed, which have been forgiven and forgotten by God, we should apply ourselves to the very real live suffering of others. I am thinking of trafficking of children, the sweat-shop factories and the mining of toxic minerals. Minerals, which are necessary for the production of our mobile phones, electric cars, and all sorts of devices, including the one that this is written on.

Crawford Mackenzie

THEY THINK IT’S ALL OVER

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I thought it was all over. I really did. I really hoped. I fully expected it would be the end of the matter and I wouldn’t have to shout and moan anymore about Covid: about the lockdown, about the masks, about the vaccine. The truth would eventually out and people would make their own judgement on the whole sorry business. The movers and shakers would finally confess to their duplicity, an amnesty declared and we could move on.

Apparently not. A letter from our Public Health Director came through the door the other day, inviting me for a winter (Covid and Flu) vaccine, explaining, in the predictable language that we have gotten used to, that this was the best protection against the disease, with the mantra “safe and effective”. My appointment was already made. It was up to me to accept or cancel.  I had a similar letter the previous year and wrote to the Director explaining my reason for refusing it and my misgivings over why the MHRA vaccine was still being promoted by our National Health Service. When there was so much concern over its safety and efficacy, why had the roll out not been halted?  I had no reply. I understood, of course, that Directors of Public Health would already have too much on their minds to respond to a dissident patient. 

So, I hesitated from responding, this time round, but decided to try again and seek a response to my concerns. In my letter I again detailed my disquiets and challenged the director to take the issue seriously. I thought it was her job to do just that. To her credit, I had a reply by return.  It didn’t answer my questions directly but pointed me to the reports and analysis which justified the continuation of the MHRA vaccine. It was the classic case of passing the buck. She has to follow the guidance offered further up the chain and wasn’t in a position to give personal opinions. Even if she had some misgivings herself, she wouldn’t feel it was in her gift to go against or challenge the given line. It is disturbing and destructive trend in much of public life when common sense is eclipsed by protocol. When “whistle blowers” have to be protected you know how deep corruption has set in. “Theirs’s not to make reply, theirs’s not to reason why, their’s but to do and die,” As someone has said.

But the truth will out and it is already seeping from the rancid bags of lies that have been festering over the past five years. Bit by bit people are quietly coming out with admissions of “errors of judgements”.  Chris Wittie now says that masks, out-with the health care environment, were always ineffective, Patrick Vallance openly admitted that lockdown could do more harm than good, Rishi Sunak protested that he was always against school closures, Pfizer admitted that they never tested the vaccine for transmission, the World Health Organisation downplayed the aerosol theory of transmission, all the key players showed, by their own lifestyles, that they never actually believed in the message, Mark Zuckerberg regretted that he supressed anti-Covid messages on his Facebook platform and Neil Ferguson confessed his surprise that they were able to get away with enforcing the lockdown. Well it seems he did and all the others too.

It is the classic state of a corrupt institution. Those who were found out, whose untruths and deliberate lies directly caused so much damage and suffering, are still there, moved sideways, perhaps, into equally remunerative posts while the much vaunted Public Enquiry trundles on tip-toing around the edge and staying clear of the real questions.  No one can speak out, it seems, or it will bring the whole thing down and the foot soldiers, those loyal to the organisation and faithful to the protocol, are left to answer the difficult questions.

I thought it was all over, but it looks like it won’t be.